Tom didn’t like that. He suggests that because McGrath doesn’t believe Thompson and then sees that Thompson is indeed a mythicist that somehow McGrath has failed to read his book.

Here is my problem, however. The question is about respect for ones own words. If you aren’t reading the arguments in the book, and you fabricate a strawman to attack instead of the actual arguments, you fail as a researcher, as a scholar. I’m not saying James is not competent or that he is in someway a bad scholar (quite the opposite is true), but when you make a claim like ‘what does this point have to do with historicity?’ when clearly Thompson is asking THAT SAME QUESTION about Ehrman’s misreading of his work, then there is a problem there. Joel continues:

I’m trying not to comment too much on Thompson’s article, finding some personal flaws in it, but it is rather clear that Thompson is a mythicist.

Whether or not Thompson considers himself a mythicist is irrelevant to what McGrath is doing or what I am arguing. If Thompson writes a book against Q, is his book then a ‘mythicist book’? Or is it a book against the case for Q? That is the point here. James seems to want to create this false umbrella over Thompson’s The Messiah Myth and label it mythicism. THAT is wrong. That is an example of someone not being true to the sources, not being accurate in their presentation of the data. And if someone just parrots the same mistake, they’re guilty of it too. It has nothing to do about disagreements; it is about being competent as a scholar. Let’s just be clear on that.

Finally, Joel makes this statement:

That’s the problem, ain’t it. Mythicism is being redefined merely as a healthy dose of doubt. I would say that if we are redefining the word, then we should see that it is a healthy dose of the loss of reality…

But this isn’t the case. I’m not sure Thompson has ever really defined himself as a mythicist. If anything, it may be that others have hoisted that label upon him, much in the way that others hoisted the label ‘minimalist’ on him decades ago, and he just sort of adopted it. And that is fine. All derogatory phrases are, at some point or another, redefined because there is the err of stereotyping and labeling people, while simultaneously fabricating a mythos about them. And that seems to be what is happening here.

Thompson is no fringe scholar, but it pains me to see James McGrath treating him as if he were, while at the same time ignoring the rather glaring and irresponsible problems with Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist. In my opinion, Thompson’s work has been far superior to anything that Ehrman has written. Some may disagree, but frankly, I just don’t care enough to debate it.

People are so quick to jump on the ‘mythicist’ bandwagon anymore, and that is problematic both because it perpetuates stereotypes and stalls any sort of real conversation about the issues–and I’m not talking about historicity, here. I’m talking about the issues. Like the value of literary criticism over historical criticism, or the value of the arguments against Q, or arguments over genre criticism, or the function of syncretism, because people are so quick to lump them into categories like ‘parallelomania’ or ‘mythicism’.

And that is what is happening here. Thompson is explaining, quite directly, that his book The Messiah Myth had nothing to do with the question of historicity. Even his chapter in our collection of essays doesn’t address the question–it doesn’t bother with it. Because Thompson finds no use for it. And neither do I. And whenever someone talks about it as if it were a book on mythicism, or about historicity, it only proves to me, above all else, that they haven’t read it. It is as simple as that.